two ghosts . [stucky]

moon dances over your good side

They get to Tampa around one in the morning. Bucky had rolled down the window after it had stopped raining and they'd gotten off the highway, but the humidity was still a novelty sensation compared to the higher elevation of Georgia and the Carolinas. The air felt like velvet on his skin, something luxurious and foreign and sensual. Bucky was used to sensation, but not like this. He wasn't used to enjoying things like food and sounds and soft clothing.

He wasn't used to noticing how he felt - emotionally, or physically. He wasn't used to being aware.

Bucky tucks the memory of that feeling away, that first taste of Florida air - another precious thing he clung to like a boat in the ocean of his turbulent mind.

They pull into the parking lot of their motel - its a run down sort of place, with architecture from what Bucky guesses is about 1950 (and probably hasn't been updated since then), painted an alarming shade of turquoise. The hot neon pink sign for the 'Twin Palms Motel' buzzes faintly in the thick night, advertising vacancies in contrasting neon green.

Bucky wonders if sometimes he also advertises vacancy - he's still getting the hang of emoting properly. He knows he sometimes looks like he's never had a thought in his life, much less an emotion. But that vacancy didn't come from nowhere, Bucky reminds himself, without too much bitterness. Perhaps not enough bitterness, considering.

Bucky takes a deep breath in through his mouth, savoring the salt air on his tongue. They're about half a mile away from the beach, but the ocean still has a way of permeating everything around it. The palm trees rustle softly above them, a soft audience watching from aloft.

Steve carries their bags up to the second floor of the motel complex. The lights are off, but even in the dim light from the street lamps Steve can see the carpet is an atrocious pattern of tropical plants. The bed covers match the color of the building, if a little more vibrant. Everything in Florida eventually ended up becoming a bleached out version of itself. Being closer to the equator, buildings and furniture and fabric tended to get washed out if left in the sun too long.

Steve absent-mindedly thought it wouldn't be so bad, having everything about him become faded and soft. Not just his body - which sometimes, in the darkness of his room, he would pray would just stop working, let him go to that darkest of sleeps - but his thoughts, too. These days, every memory he had was sharp and dark and jabbed against his heart like a cattle prod.

He tried to remind himself that this was a good thing - this was his way of healing. And besides, he had to make sure Bucky was healing, too. Bucky had been his reason for turning half the world upside down. Bucky, as dramatic as Steve knew he was being, was his reason for surviving all this time.

Now, maybe, together, they could focus on living.

"You hungry? It's not New York, but I'm sure a city as big as this has somewhere that's open this late," Steve asks, throwing his duffel bag on the bed closer to the door.

Bucky looks a little miffed about his choice of bed, but says nothing. "Sure," Bucky replies.

They lock the door again and Bucky pulls a leather glove over his metal hand on their way down the stairs. They walk in relative silence, but comfortable with each other's company.

When Bucky had first shown up at Steve's apartment, more than a month ago now, Bucky was barely a sentient being. He ate mechanically, talked only when spoken to, and his eyes were more often than not glazed over in a dissociative trance. There was no anger, no sadness - just void behind his grey eyes.

It left Steve more than a little unsettled - Bucky fell in the uncanny valley category of human-looking things that other people knew instinctively weren't actually human; like mannequins, and AI that speak and move like a real person but there's something off . The soul, spirit, psuche as the Greeks called it - just wasn't there.